In 1997, as part of its "Library Without Walls" project, Los
Alamos National Laboratory began offering online public access
to thousands of unclassified reports reflecting fifty years of
research in nuclear science and technology, and related topics.

Five years later, as part of the post-September 11 purge of
government web sites, public access to this material was
terminated.

But in a spectacular information-salvage operation, most of
these Los Alamos documents, comprising nearly ten gigabytes,
were acquired and preserved by independent researchers Gregory
Walker and Carey Sublette.

"We archived them," said Sublette, "before the 'Library Without
Walls' became the 'Library of Walls'."

Selected reports of special interest will be posted in weeks and
months to come. As time and disk space allow, Secrecy News
will entertain requests to post particular documents listed in
the indexes.

A REVIEW OF CRITICALITY ACCIDENTS

Among the Los Alamos documents preserved by Walker and Sublette
is a 1967 account of all known nuclear "criticality" accidents
as of that time.

A criticality accident is an unintended acceleration of the
chain reaction of neutrons in a mass of fissile material. In a
worst case scenario, supercriticality can lead to fuel melting
and explosion. Of 34 criticality incidents identified by the
Los Alamos report, six of them resulted in a total of eight
deaths.

Does public access to such reports matter? Would an ordinary
member of the public have any interest in a technical account
of past criticality accidents?

The answer is yes. In fact, twenty years ago the history of
nuclear reactor criticality accidents was at the center of a
public dispute over the safety of the small research reactor on
the UCLA campus before it was permanently shut down in 1984.

The Los Angeles-based Committee to Bridge the Gap, led by Dan
Hirsch, successfully challenged relicensing of the UCLA reactor
after pointing out that the water-cooled, graphite moderated
reactor core had positive reactivity coefficients, a
significant design flaw, and was vulnerable to an accidental
power excursion. Public access to technical reports bearing on
the problem played a crucial role in clarifying the issue and
ensuring public safety.

According to an often repeated anecdote, physicist Enrico Fermi
once wondered aloud about the existence of extraterrestrial
beings and why they had not shown up on Earth: "Where is
everybody?"

In another Los Alamos report that was withdrawn from online
public access, Los Alamos scientist Eric M. Jones tracked down
the three colleagues with whom Fermi discussed the matter --
Edward Teller, Herbert York, and Emil Konopinski -- and
obtained their written recollections of the 1950 conversation.

The Department of Energy this week published its most recent
periodic report on inadvertent disclosures of classified
nuclear weapons information in declassified files at the
National Archives.

Out of 1.2 million pages reviewed, DOE officials identified 574
pages containing classified information that should not have
been disclosed. The most frequently identified subject of the
inadvertent disclosures concerned "storage locations" (of
nuclear weapons) and "stockpile quantities."

The value of this archival document hunt is questionable.

Considering that validated nuclear weapons designs and
production equipment are reportedly in international
circulation, and that thousands of kilograms of highly enriched
uranium exported by the U.S. have yet to be recovered, the
dogged pursuit of inadvertently disclosed historical details,
"classified" though they may be, seems more and more absurd.

See the Twelfth Report on Inadvertent Releases of Restricted
Data and Formerly Restricted Data under Executive Order 12958,
August 2003, declassified version released February 2004:

From 1973 to 1980, military dictatorships in Chile, Argentina,
Uruguay, Bolivia, Paraguay and Brazil collaborated in an
alliance known "Condor." The alliance employed the full
apparatus of torture, "disappearances," and other extreme human
rights abuses in the name of combating Marxist insurgents.
Thousands of innocent civilians were killed.

Investigative journalist John Dinges tells the story of Condor,
and fills in many heretofore missing gaps in the record, in a
well-received new book called "The Condor Years: How Pinochet
and His Allies Brought Terrorism to Three Continents." See:

The state of U.S. intelligence is such that "It is not
surprising that hypotheses tend to harden into dogma, that
their sensitivity to changed conditions is not articulated, and
that new data are not sought to test them."

Remarkably, this critique of intelligence comes from the CIA
itself. And as perfectly apt as it may sound today, it was
written in 1971.

The same critique notes an imbalance between collection and
analysis, tensions between civilian and military intelligence,
and the structural weakness that limits the effectiveness of
the DCI.

The enduring relevance of these and other criticisms more than
30 years later suggests that efforts to reform the U.S.
intelligence bureaucracy are futile and possibly diversionary.

See "A Review of the Intelligence Community," March 10, 1971,
released in declassified form in 1998 (50 pages, 800 KB PDF
file):